Archive for the ‘Features’ Category

Scalability is one of the biggest benefits of cloud computing. Compared to traditional physical servers, cloud servers offer dynamic elasticity that allows businesses to scale “up” or “out” based on load or demand. Scaling “out” means adding more servers to your infrastructure and scaling “up” means adding resources (like RAM) to an existing cloud server.

Adding more cloud servers to your GoGrid infrastructure is easy, as is creating a GoGrid Server Image (GSI). Just a quick refresher: you would use a GSI to deploy copies of a particular server configuration or setup—this is horizontal scalability: create a GoGrid cloud server, save an image of it, and deploy copies of that server.

But let’s say that you want a particular server to have a little more power. One of the best “upgrades” you can make to any computer or server is to add more RAM. Running applications consumes RAM (as does the underlying operating system). Giving that server more RAM will make it run even more efficiently.

Before we walk through this process, it’s important to remember that RAM scaling only works on “hourly” GoGrid Cloud Servers. If your server is on a monthly, semi-annual, or annual plan, you won’t be able to scale your server. In that case, you’ll want to create a GSI of an existing server and then deploy a new hourly server based on that GSI. If you do have an hourly cloud server, the process is easy. (more…) «How To Scale Your GoGrid Infrastructure»

Building out a highly available website means that it is fault-tolerant and reliable. A best practice is to put your web servers behind a load balancer not only to distribute load, but also to mitigate the risk of an end user accessing a failing web server. However, traditional load balancing funnels traffic into a single-tenant environment—a single point of failure. A better practice is to have a distributed load balancer that takes advantage of the features of the cloud and increases the fault-tolerance abilities on the load balancer. GoGrid’sDynamic Load Balancer service is designed around a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture that turns the data center into one big load balancer.

GoGrid’s Dynamic Load Balancer offers many features, but one of its core features is high availability (HA). It is HA in two ways.

First, on the real server side, deploying multiple clones of your real servers is a standard load-balancing practice. That way, if one of your servers goes down, the load balancer will use the remaining servers in the pool to continue to serve up content. In addition, each GoGrid cloud server that you deploy as a web server (in the real server pool) is most likely on a different physical node. This setup provides additional protection in the case of hardware failure.

Second, on the Dynamic Load Balancer side, the load balancers are designed to be self-healing. In case of a hardware failure, Dynamic Load Balancing is designed to immediately recover to a functioning node. The Virtual IP address of the Dynamic Load Balancer (the VIP) is maintained as well as all the configurations, with all the changes happening on the back end. This approach ensures the Dynamic Load Balancer will continue to function with minimal interruption, preventing the Dynamic Load Balancer from being a single point of failure. Because the load balancer is the public-facing side of a web server, whenever it goes down the website goes down. Having a self-healing load balancer therefore makes the web application more resilient.

Users with websites or applications that need to always be available would benefit from including GoGrid’s Dynamic Load Balancing in their infrastructure. The load balancer is important for ensuring the public side of a service is always available; however, including easily scalable cloud servers, the ability to store images of those servers in persistent storage, and the option to replicate infrastructure between data centers with CloudLink are all important elements of a successful HA setup.

Let’s say that you have fully configured a Cloud Server running on GoGrid. You’re so proud of your achievement that you want to share your configuration with your team or perhaps even with the GoGrid community. And let’s imagine that you or your company has developed a software solution that you’d like to monetize within a Public Cloud. Well, the process of creating and sharing a GoGrid Cloud Server Image (GSI) is easy and literally takes just a few minutes.

GoGrid has recently released some new features that improve on the customer experience using our private network. Private Network Automation (PNA) is currently available in all our data centers. As of this most recent release, these new features will be exposed if you enable PNA by contacting support:

All servers will have a private IP assigned upon creation (both virtual and dedicated)

Any private IPs that are used will be marked as assigned on the portal

The assignment of private IPs happen automatically at the time a new server is deployed. GoGrid has enabled this for all new customers. If you are an existing customer, this is feature IS NOT enabled in data centers where you have servers deployed. You will need to file a support ticket to request this feature. Note that once enabled, this will be active for all new servers only – existing servers will keep their existing settings.

As you can see from the screenshot below, once you create the server, you will have a public IP and a private IP assigned. Note that this feature is enabled for both virtual and dedicated servers.

This is also visible in the Networking tab so that you can monitor private IPs that have been assigned from your block.

If you visit the GoGrid homepage, you’ll be greeted with the following headline:

We make cloud infrastructure easy. Really easy.

But without trying our cloud infrastructure service, how can you really know what “easy” means? It can be completely subjective and open to interpretation. Even so, we stand firmly by our statement. It IS easy because it simply boils down to 3 action words:

1. select2. configure3. deploy.

Don’t just take my word for it though. Your best bet is to test it out yourself. (Here’s a hint: If you’re new to GoGrid, contact one of our Cloud Experts, mention this blog post, and get a $100 service credit to see if we’re right.)